Posted
by
Roblimo
on Thursday January 09, 2014 @02:06PM
from the a-camera-that-gives-you-an-eye-in-the-back-of-your-head dept.

The device that does this is the Geonaute 360 Degree Camera. The Geonaute display caught Tim Lord's eye at CES, and he got Geonauter (is that a word?) Marian Le Calves to show him the company's "action camera," which costs $499 -- or more accurately, will cost $499 when it starts shipping. Until then, you can pre-order. Or you could buy a GoPro camera for as little as $199. Geonaute has a bunch of videos on YouTube, some of which are quite fetching. But GoPo has a bunch of slick YouTube videos, too, and at this point they're the dominant brand in the action camera market niche. Will Geonaute be able to capture a decent market share with their 360 degree coolness -- and higher price? Or will they, GoPro, and other action camera vendors get into a price war so that every kid who has a skateboard can make good-looking videos?

The GoPano relies on focusing on a mirror. When that mirror gets scratched, smudged, or warped you notice it. Also, the image quality just isnt there. Don't take my word for it, just look at any of the HD videos on youtube.

My experience has been with the EyeSee360 and still photos. It was great as a novelty until you realize that the pictures just don't look that great.

And then I re-read the headline. Shot too quick here, missed the fact it said "videos". I don't *think* Theta does those, although there's no reason it couldn't. (And there are other products already on the market which can.)

However, mod me down for being an idiot this time round; it's a fair cop.

Most of what makes for a good looking video has to do with subject tracking, slow pans, good lighting, image cropping to avoid distractions, sound quality and levels, and things you're never going to see from typical users of this device.

These cameras are usually used for outdoor sports. The lighting tends to be good enough and, being sunlight, is out of the control of the sportsman.

What makes a 360 camera great is that subject tracking, pans, and cropping can be done in post. With other cameras having with a standard wide to narrow focal length, they require good camera work as you describe. This is why Go Pro videos are boring at best. Assuming they're rigged well, they do capture the subject matter, but in the most boring way possible. M

What makes a 360 camera great is that subject tracking, pans, and cropping can be done in post.

Why do so many people seem to miss the fact that you can't fake perspective? Taking a crop or using a longer lens does not get you the same picture as getting closer (and vice versa). Same with actually following a subject: taking a crop and trying to correct the image to make it look straight is not the same as actually shooting from the angle you need. These cameras are just going to lead to more bad content

When I saw 360 degree videos in the headline, I looked at the bag I had just packed for my trip tomorrow, containing my ageing, but decent, video-capable DSLR, and my fish-eye lens. Nothing new about either of those parts, and that's got a 360 degree horizon when looking straight up or down.And my, the perspective...

Is it HD Video, and can be used with 3D TV's, and/or 3D shutter glasses, then yes.If you have sample timelapse videos of flowers blooming, rollercoaster rides, first-person views of skydiving, sub-sea diving, acrobats, jugglers, aircraft carrier landings, then that is perfect.

I'm not - I spent most of the snowboarders video trying to scroll around to get back to a normal forward view, and failing. Part of any kind of art is trimming the raw material down to the gold nugget inside. We're not impressed by a hunk of stone, but we are impressed when someone takes that stone and carves an elephant from it. This camera just gives you all the raw video in every direction, like that hunk of stone. Other than inside a 360 degree theater like in Canada's pavilion at Epcot (the only on

No, you don't. The quality is pretty low, and it reminds me of the first web cameras. The lighting is not correctly adjusted between the captors (iso / aperture / exposure time ?) and the player is horrible with very wide high resolution desktop. Oh well, maybe in a few years!

So does it work better , worse, or the same as the free app for Android my buddy showed me the other day that does the same thing (actually, it may just be something built in, I didn't actually ask if it was an app).

... do nothing. It's not launched yet. I hate how every year at CES, all of these vaporware or half-ass products are announced and demoed, and everybody acts like they are on the shelves as we speak. You won't ever see 90% of this crap.

So this is supposedly the same company that makes cheap copies of Suunto/Garmin watches [decathlon.nl] for the French budget sports chain Decathlon? Name and logo are identical. That is weird, because usually Decathlon sells slightly inferior products for a far lower price (which makes the Decathlon chain very popular with people that care more for outdoor sports than for appearances).

I did visual effects for the first four Fast and Furious movies. We did a lot of the car photography on a green-screen stage, and comped in backgrounds shot driving down streets. We used arrays of film cameras, usually Arri 435s (on Fast 2 we also used VistaVision cameras.)

These would be much simpler, cheaper, and more rugged.

There are similar cameras from Point Grey [ptgrey.com]. These have been out for quite some time. The Point Grey cameras are an order of magnitude more expensive than these vaporware ca

...and mount a conical mirror with the apex inward, I'd say on a cutout lens cap. Very easily doable with superglue and a couple paperclips. In fact, it's been done with smartphones. I think there's one out for the iphone 4.

I'd kill for a product like this that could be mounted to a pole on my roof and viewed in realtime with host software running on a PC (or Android tablet, if it had the horsepower to do the realtime deconvolution and virtual PTZ).

This would also turn it into a kick-ass security camera for places where aesthetics are less important than performance and cost

To keep the base cost low, they could make the ethernet+PoE an optional second module that the main one screws into and feeds the raw bitstream that would